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Comment by tempaway43563 | Hacker News Reader

There's a weird 'blogging is good' mentality around here but the truth is writing a decent blog post takes a lot of time and gives very little return.

Highlighting people who unexpectedly rose to fame is no use, thats just survivor bias, for every Mike Posner there's millions of musicians who spend years trying to make it with no success.

'Write content for your future fans' is also survivor bias advice. In the attention economy most blogs will just be ignored forever.

So here's my advice: Its ok to give up. I think 'never give up' is terrible advice. People can waste years of their lives due to 'never give up'. There is wisdom in knowing when to give up and spend your time on something else. For most people, blogging is a waste of time and they'd be better off going for a nice walk.

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Every single reader on my blog that has sent me high-quality written material of their own has independently gone viral without any signal boosting from me. Off the top of my head, Iris Meredith, Mira Welner, Scott Smitelli, Daniel Sidhion. Usually within a few days of writing whatever the piece was, but sometimes months later.

Some of the posts weren't even remotely optimized for it. Daniel wrote about very nerdy NixOS optimization, Scott wrote a 20K story about the horror of bullshit jobs, etc.

Survivor bias is a real thing, but there's also a real dearth of quality writers out there. I'd encourage anyone who enjoys writing to do it for the love of the game, and as long as you occasionally show it to someone or post it on HN, good things will come.

My life was totally changed around the time I had 100 readers, and that number is extremely achievable. Going beyond that hasn't really helped me that much, as you quickly lose the ability to form deep connections with people.

(However, if you're frustrated by blogging then by all means, give up. I do think that what carries the writers above is that they're in it for the love of the crafts they're writing about in addition to being talented writers. Trying to grind out success sounds dreadful and I feel like it scarcely works.)

>gone viral

What digits are we talking about?

Most of them hit #1 on Hackernews or close to it. That's usually between 100K and 300K hits, and they're pretty high-quality hits since it's usually non-trash software engineers, contrasted with the twelve year olds you'd get if it was 200K YouTube hits.

Yeah the average quality is low that any writer even semi competent stands out.

Literally people who can’t even hold five complex thoughts in their mind simultaneously can become notable writers because the bar is on the ground for the vast majority of niches.

>My life was totally changed around the time I had 100 readers

If I may ask, in what way do you mean changed? In a personal fulfillment sense or more like financial/networking/etc.?

Ludicity has blogged about his journey from having a shitty job to running his own company in the past. Writing played a big role there (see e.g. https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/merry-christmas-ya-filthy-an...).

Now I am the one that provides the shitty jobs! Back to work, peasants! And don't let me ever catch you not maximizing Jira velocity, or time with your family is being moved to the backlog!

It isn't bad financially, but I make much less money than I did two years ago. If I had taken any of the jobs I was offered, I think it would have been a 30K to 100K raise. Also the number is slowly going up, and unlike a day job, no one will tell me I'm earning "enough". If I hit enough to salary myself 500K one day, there will be no social norms preventing HR from giving me that.

I am way, way happier. I've met some really amazing people from all over the world. I also have access to a level of technical mentorship that has totally changed the way I engineer -- but you get other people too. I've spent a lot of time with the mythical thoughtful CEO (can confirm that they are an outlier and the median CEO is as bullheaded as they appear), gotten the inside scoop on a lot of stuff that used to confuse the hell out of me, and last week got invited to a group of writers in Melbourne that are helping me get a book out! And it's also, for me, a special kind of awe-inspiring to meet people that have produced truly great literature. I'd never had had the opportunity before that.

That's like, roughly what you'll get at 100 to 200 people if you write things that repel the energy you don't like. At a few thousand subscribers it gets a bit hairier because you don't have time to talk to everyone. I'm also definitely someone that leans hard enough into the parasociality that it becomes regular sociality, which might not be for everyone, and perhaps I'll run into a real sicko one day and regret it.

Ahhh I didn't realize it was you I was responding to, I'm familiar with your blog and you definitely deserve your success.

>It was the end of the "stand up", which Valera had graciously been invited to. They did it sitting down, which was her first clue that one of the Chaos Gods was involved.

I still think about this line, it's just too good.

In 2021 I started blogging, mostly wrote about what I was thinking and building, mostly because I enjoy writing and had too much spare time during the pandemic. Didn't really advertise the blog or anything, but people found it and started sharing it on among other places, HN. I don't run ads or anything like that, the blog is 100% a vector for people to discover my work.

As a direct consequence of this choice, I've been able to quit my job and live off building stuff and posting about it online. If I had not started the blog, this would not have happened. I would still have toiled away in anonymity at my job.

Is this guaranteed to happen to everyone who starts a blog? Of course not, that would be a ridiculous claim, I've had blogs before that went nowhere too, mostly because I didn't really have anything interesting to write. Though it does keep happening to a lot of people, eventually myself included.

I'm a big believer in the concept of luck surface area as an explanatory model. The probability of getting lucky is the product of how much you are doing and how much you are talking about it. Maximizing this area maximizes the likelihood of positive career outcomes.

Though I don't think it has to be blogging in particular. Blogging works for me because I enjoy writing. Someone else might do better on youtube, in local tech user groups, in the conference circuit, or even just networking a lot and talking to your friends about your work.

Sticking with it is sort of good advice however, as these things are heavily momentum based. Discovery often takes time, but the more people who discover your content, the more it gets shared, and the more people will discover it. This is generally true in any medium.

Though again, the key is to find something you enjoy. If it feels like a chore, it's unlikely you'll stick with it.

I actually believe that blogging (or making video, or a podcast) is good. It allows to structure our thought and synthetize them.

What I don't believe in is the OP post or many comments in hacker news on the topic: blogging in the hope to gain something beyond self-improvement.

First it's a very different best to write for gaining fame and popularity than to organize your thought. Then the market is totally overcrowded and difficult to beat, even for just a normal revenu stream. Finally: many people, maybe most, get the fun sucked out of them when they try to convert a hobby in a job.

So while I would not avocate to not blog if you want to get rich and famous, I would say it is not really a good strategy

Maybe usually it’s just for personal fun or learning. I think “your audience” can be you and that’s enough. I’ve personally written articles for nobody but myself and “the world” and I’m shocked by how much traffic they get over a decade later. Sometimes the little esoteric things you record for nobody in particular shows up for those particular nobodies and it matters.

Or, here's a wild thought that is lost on many young people in today's climate:

what about creating for the sake of creation? Where the end goal is already achieved by creating - whether or not you gain fame or a huge following from it is secondary. I assure you, people like this still exist, and are probably much happier for it.

there are already plenty of people who create for the sake of creating. but some sort of tangible or quantifiable return is nice, too.

It's all about serendipity to me. If you don't ever put yourself out there, there is 0 chance that opportunity will show up, but if you do it even a little there is a chance it finds you. HN is prime for people wanting to blog because blogging is the most accessible way a writer can get his stuff out there, and HN is all about doing things and making stuff

I think the key thing is to keep iterating and experimenting. Keep posting into the void, but don't keep doing it the same way every time. If your tweets get 5 views, don't just keep tweeting. Try a different platform, or target the tweet at a community/niche, or try presenting the post/content in a different way, etc. If you find something that works even marginally better, double down on that.

Often the people who seem to suddenly "make it" are doing this, but it gets left out of the story.

> There's a weird 'blogging is good' mentality around here but the truth is writing a decent blog post takes a lot of time and gives very little return.

I think the argument is 'writing is good'. But writing in isolation provides little feedback or upside, so there is some desire / pressure to publish what you write.

As to why - writing forces you to formulate thoughts in a linear fashion to communicate them with an audience you might not know. I personally want to better develop that skill!

> But writing in isolation provides little feedback or upside, so there is some desire / pressure to publish what you write.

This is like saying that that personal hobbies provide little feedback or upside.

The upside is that you enjoy the activity and what it produces. That's also the feedback.

Are you claiming that nobody should write a diary without publishing it to the world?

I'm 100% for writing a diary, journal, lab notes, personal knowledge base, etc without ever publishing it. I think it's a great thing to do.

But I think publishing your writing requires you to consider an audience and be clear about what you're saying. I've gone back through my journals many times and wondered what I meant when I wrote it?

Additionally publishing something add upside - like someone sending you an email asking a question or others building on your ideas.

ps. I'm not saying this as a success writer, I'm saying this as someone with almost a 100 unpublished drafts and some regrets :)

> As to why - writing forces you to formulate thoughts in a linear fashion

but why is that desirable?

Writing, making music, making art, and engaging with the public in any way is almost always a waste of time. So unless you want to keep it up even in light of knowing that it's a waste of time, you should stop wasting your time. If you have to arduously convince yourself over and over that "this is important" or if you require the affirmation and reassurance of constant positivity-oozing social media followers to keep going, then you should not keep going. If it's not an end in itself for you then you need to reckon with the fact that there will certainly be nothing for you in it except the thankless task itself.

That may sound depressing but there are other things in life that absolutely are worthwhile in these ways. Helping people is generally a better goal in life than self-expression is.

If your definition of a return on your blogging/writing investment is how many likes you got, you're doing it for the wrong reasons.

I am in no way a good writer, and I don't have an audience, however a few of the articles I've published on my personal site have resulted in a small number of extremely high quality responses from almost exactly the people I wanted to reach. For example, I wrote a review of an insulin pump and received a reply a few days later from a director at the company thanking me for the review and that he was sharing it with his team.

So I'd say blogging can absolutely can pay off, if you think of it in terms of making connections with the right people over time.

Yes, the article is pure 'airplane meme'. So a mediocre musician had a hit. So what. Realism is better than false hope.

Let's flip it around: Who are the survivors who did none of the things people prescribe?

Thats fine as long as you're happy to be part of the long tail

The goodness of blogging is not limited to fame. There's having something concrete to show to employers, the practice for communication (probably only becoming more important in an era of LLM code), working ideas out, getting them out of your head, and yeah, sure, also buying that lottery ticket for fame.

I also use it for things I want to post over and over again, so now I can just link a variety of arguments instead of making them again.

However, I would also agree that if one's personal metric is "I want to be famous" that just pounding away at it is a bad use of time. [1] I would also agree that while I consider it a generally good exercise often worth the time to at least some extent that per basic Econ 101, the marginal utility does diminish as your "consumption" of "writing blog posts" increases and I'm not recommending some sort of unlimited blank check be allocated to it because it never stops being worthwhile... of course it does. That's true of anything.

[1] If you do want to be "famous" my suggestion would be 1. Be sure you have something to say; if your blog posts are effectively reproducible via a prompt to an LLM you're not going to rise above the noise 2. Be regular, and as such, be willing to be repetitive. 3. Do a bit of promotion, like posting to HN and other places 4. Once you have a base, don't just lean into it; start trying to get into conference speakerships. The "good" ones are hard but there are many conferences starving for content, slots are not actually that hard to come by. 5. Do a good job with those; see numerous resources on how to give presentations, don't be afraid to do some stuff like Toastmasters and stuff if you need to. 6. Pound away at that. It generally seems more likely to me to work than pushing just from the blog angle. That said, you can't skip step 1. It doesn't have to be "unique" but it does need to be something other than just "Hey, you should, you know, write good code."

(The thing I choked on personally is the "be repetitive" part. Way back in the first couple of years of my site, back when it had a different focus, I did it for a while, but got tired of it relatively quickly. One of the major reasons I write things on my site is precisely so I can link to them and not repeat myself as much. However every majorly successful blog I've even been subscribed to is quite repetitive; the same takes applied to a string of news stories, the same points every couple of weeks... it is what it is, I'm not necessarily criticizing it, it clearly works, but it's not what I wanted. As a result I don't have the regularity sufficient to "break out". Well, that's fine, I'm not really seeking to "break out" anyhow.)

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